 WHILE silver still remains a moral rather than an economical issue in Colorado, and a citizen's opinion on the coinage question establishes his social status as his views on baptism would have done in another decade and place, the year 1894 is witnessing the evolution of the Slate from a silver-producing to a gold-producing one.
Finding it impossible to mine silver profitably at present prices, the Colorado miners have simply turned their attention to the gold-bearing veins of the great mineral belt reaching from Long's Peak to beyond the southwest corner of the State, and they promise to dig up during the year from fifteen to twenty millions of dollars in the yellow metal. Nor is this estimate an extravagant one.
Besides the newly discovered district of Cripple Creek, where there are millions almost literally "in sight," and the "Little Kingdom of Gilpin," which has been steadily producing its quota of gold for more than a quarter of a century, there are estimated to be five thousand opened veins in old or abandoned camps which have lain dormant since the mining of silver has been so much more profitable than that of gold, but which have been taken up this spring.
And in the districts of Leadville, San Juan. Boulder, Clear
Creek, Silver Cliff, Rosita, Breckenridge, Red Cliff, and innumerable other camps, thousands of the silver-miners of a year ago are now at work in the gold mines, and thousands more are prospecting in the mountains, and daily locating new claims.
All through this vast gold territory, two hundred miles long by eighty miles wide, there is scarcely a square mile of hill-side where the conditions of mineralization exist that does not bear the marks of the gold-hunter—either the mine in full operation, with its shaft-house and "dump,"
or the small mound of yellowish soil where the miner has perhaps unsuccessfully put in his probe, or which marks a spot where a mining-plant is to be erected; but nowhere throughout the gold region do the sides of the grand old mountains remain unscarred.
Cripple Creek is the camp "on the
boom," and hence the most interesting to the mere sight-seer. It is also the most productive camp in the State, over two and a quarter millions of dollars having been taken out of the ground last year, and the estimated production for this year, with two railroads soon to be completed into the camp, being
$7,000,000.
The Cripple Creek district lies near the western base of Pike's Peak. 9400 feet above the sea-level, at a distance from Colorado Springs of twenty miles as the crow flies, or more than thirty miles if the crow preferred to go by way of the Midland Railroad and the stage-coach line. It is not until the
traveler boards the train that winds among lofty hills from Colorado Springs to Midland, whence the rest of the distance is by stage or wagon over the mountains, that the appearance of his fellow-passengers begins to suggest the wilderness and the rugged life of the mines.
Until we reached Colorado Springs the passengers on the trains were the usual heterogeneous lot that one sees on the railroads all over the country. The occupants of the train that left the Springs for Midland, however, were all obviously mining men intent on mining business, or tourists bent on else than pleasure.
A fine-looking lot of men they were, too, big fellows with slouch hats and trousers in boots for the most part, mine-owners, prospectors, and speculators. One of them was accompanied by a pretty little girl, not more than five or six years of age, who was evidently a veteran
traveler, to judge from the experienced air with which she took off her fur tippet, cloak, and hat, and handed them, one after the other, to her father to place in the rack above her head before she settled her small self comfortably at the windows.
I was told that she had been born in a mining-camp, where her mother died, and that, following her father's varying fortunes, she had during her brief career roughed it in most of the camps of the State, and a more contented little girl than she appeared to be I have seldom seen. The only others of her sex were two brilliantly attired ladies who remained under middle age with a cosmetic effort, and who, like their fellow-passengers, were going to Cripple Creek—"adventuresses" they would be called in polite society.
There was also an evil-faced gambler, accompanied by a lame bull-pup, for which he evinced a tender solicitude. An English capitalist, who was said to represent a syndicate that was prepared to invest largely in mines,
traveled with us in charge of an American promoter, who had brought the other across an ocean and a continent; and there were also a speculative Chinaman and two or three foreign laborers on their way to join in the search for gold.
At Midland everything was delightfully primitive, pristine, and frontierlike—when we turned our backs upon the engine. Two old-fashioned stage-coaches of the earliest type, looking exactly as if they had been
modeled after one of Remington's pictures, were waiting at the station, and to each of these were attached six powerful horses, obviously bred by another Remington student.
The drivers were just the sort of men that Bret Harte has told us all about—big and picturesque, and each absolute lord of his equipage and all who embarked with him. There were passengers enough to more than crowd both stages inside and out; and when the overloaded vehicles started, with the small and experienced
traveler aforementioned looking out of the window of one, and the lame bull - pup through the legs of the driver of the other, those who were left were obliged to wait for the stages that met the afternoon train, or to hire a special conveyance at the livery-stable.
Four of us drove over the mountain together in a surrey drawn by a pair of brisk horses, whereby it was that we reached the hotel at Cripple Creek more than an hour ahead of the stages. the pull being continuously up hill for two-thirds of the distance.
The drive from Midland to Cripple Creek on a fresh spring morning is something to be remembered. The narrow road winds along the edge of the mountains above precipitous cliffs, occasionally taking a short-cut through the sparsely growing timber to issue on a narrow ledge over another deep gorge. At varying distances the road was broadened to allow teams to pass each other, on which occasions there were very few inches to spare between the wheels of the outside vehicles and the edge of the precipice.
Our driver told us that there was no danger of our going over, but the occasional bodies of dead horses on the rocks in the gullies below us did not tend to weaken an impression that the locality might be unhealthy in some circumstances.
But it was not any fanciful danger of falling off the mountain that made the drive memorable. The scenery along this stage route is as magnificent as almost anywhere in the Rockies.
From one point the eye takes in a sweep of 300 miles of mountain ranges, with Pike's and
Long's, peaks looming grandly in the middle distance, while far to the southwest the white crests of the Sangre de Cristo are
outlined against the sky, and the intervening landscape presents a scene of tangled forest, black hills, and gloomy valleys that rouses the latent barbaric instinct that exists in every human breast, and makes one feel an impulse to turn his hack forever upon civilization and roam those primeval solitudes in savage freedom—for an hour or two.
We met numerous great four-horse wagons, loaded with ore for the railroad at Midland, on our way to Cripple Creek, and we passed many others carrying supplies for the town, which depends for its provender for man and beast on the outside world. It should make every American proud to note the fine specimens of physical manhood the West produces as compared with the same class in any other country.
All the teamsters on the road were big and brawny, and they looked every one they met squarely in the face with the true American spirit of equality, and never gave up more than half of the road—a pleasing contrast from the cringing and obsequious conduct of the peasant wagoners of any European country in making way for an equipage which looks as if it might contain an aristocrat.
A pretty sight that one would scarcely meet with anywhere outside of Western America we encountered near the town—a rosy-cheeked little girl, not more than ten years of age, with a basket on her arm, mounted on a tall bay horse, her sturdy
blue-stockinged legs just long enough to reach stirrup and pommel, going to market at a gallop.
The town of Cripple Creek, which three years ago was a cattle range, and now has a population of 7000, is an interesting jumble of the primitive and modern. Most of the houses are log huts and one-story buildings of wood, many of them unpainted (though there are several two-story structures of brick, and others in course of erection).
But the town is lighted by electricity. There is a complete waterworks system, and there are two telegraph lines and a longdistance telephone. The only method of transportation for miles around is through the medium of the horse; but the residents of the district have a newspaper that daily publishes all the important foreign happenings of the day before, as well as the principal news of the United States and Cripple Creek, and there are two banks whose ramifications extend over the world.
The gambling-houses and saloons are open all day and all night; but the town is not yet sufficiently civilized to turn them to political account, and the Mayor finds plenty of time to practise his profession, that of a physician, in the intervals of his official duties.
It is a curious anthropic miscellany that makes up the population of this bustling camp. One gets the impression that there are more loafers, and more busy men, and more men of well-to-do appearance sleeping under billiard tables, and more ragged men playing faro and roulette, than were ever before brought together. These conditions may be said to be interdependent, however, since there are two mining shifts—men who work at night and loaf in the daytime, and men who loaf at night and work by day.
As they work underground and loaf on top, they are more in evidence as loafers than as workers. Likewise, if the
well-dressed man hadn't played faro he probably would not be compelled to sleep under the billiard table, and perhaps he will soon be as ragged as the men who are playing with hard-earned money that they might better use in the purchase of clothes and other necessaries.
The position of the gambler in Cripple Creek, as in the other mining camps, is rather an anomalous one. He is a law-abiding citizen because gambling is legal in the camp, but he does not hesitate to lake the little all of the poor fellows who patronize him, and if it were not so easy for the working miner to find a faro table or roulette wheel at any hour of the day or night, he might be able to save a part of his wage.
The principal gambling-house in Cripple Creek is in a saloon which occupies the ground-floor of a double building. It contains three or four roulette wheels and as many faro tables, and runs several "crap" and "tub" games.
There is a great fireplace, large enough to burn four-foot logs, in the further
end, and here a great fire is kept roaring all night, and the games continue as long as any one will play. The proprietor of this place is a public-spirited citizen, who is a trustee in the charity hospital, takes an active part in every movement tending to further the welfare of the town, and is a highly respected member of the community.
His philanthropy in allowing all homeless men to sleep before his fire at night is descanted upon to visitors. Almost every saloon and dance-hall has its faro and roulette games, and the proprietors of these places are directly interested in the mines, and are most of them valued citizens. Gaming is within reach of all, for five-cent chips may be had at any of the tables, and a man who plays with five-dollar chips attracts almost as much attention and admiration as a plunger at Monte Carlo who plays the maximum.
The centre of activity in Cripple Creek, away from the mines, is the principal hotel—diffidently termed the "Palace"—about which surges all the commotion and bustle of the busy camp. From early morning until late at night men from the hills, on horseback and in surreys and light wagons, are continually arriving and departing; the stagecoaches from Midland and from Canon City, forty miles to the south, deposit their passengers at intervals dining the day, and idlers and busy men alike throng the verandas and corridors.
Here is the office of the stage lines; behind enclosures with iron gratings are the desks of mining brokers and real-estate agents; mining maps hang upon the walls, and the telegraph, the telephone, and the type-writer are close to one's elbow.
The photographic representations of
"The Columbia Theatre Stock Company" hold an important position above the fireplace in a gorgeous frame, gazing upon the assembled multitude as proudly as the portraits of Daly's players in the drawing-room of the Metropole in London, and there is a display of brass cuspidors that would be at once the ambition and the despair of Charles Dickens had he been spared to visit Cripple Creek.
The contrast I have noted before between the number of men who have nothing at all to do and those who apparently have a great deal more business than they can possibly attend to is nowhere more striking. Half the men in the crowded room stand for a whole evening gazing stolidly at the walls over each others' heads, devoting their emotions and energies entirely to narcotic rumination.
Those who compose the other half are scarcely on the same spot a moment at a time—scrambling up and down stairs, buttonholing one man after another, darting to the telegraph office or the telephone with a degree of energy that is sure to win success if the texts in the early copy-books are true. Mining is the sole topic of interest.
Politics, religion, even women, are seldom mentioned. The visitor overhears allusions to the Victor Mine, the leading dividend-payer; to the Anaconda, the Anna Lee,
the Strong, and the Pharmacist.
You hear that somebody has struck a vein in some mine that assays wonderfully, and has suddenly left for New York, or that pay ore has been discovered in some new district. One grizzled veteran steals up to another, touches him furtively on the shoulder, and draws him mysteriously into
a corner to exhibit cautiously a piece of rock which he holds almost entirely covered with his hands, discoursing the while in whispers, as if the public exhibition of the calculous fragment or the disclosure of the secret of its nativity meant the loss of a fortune.
Lawyers and clients in various parts of the room are holding animated discussions over maps and legal papers; reporters are drifting about the room picking up information of new developments and discoveries in the mines, mining experts are comparing ores and
opinions, the proprietor of the hotel is leading up one citizen after another to sign a petition for a more extensive mail service,
a knot of men are arguing with the clerk over the hotel register with a view to obtaining rooms, and refuse to be comforted because they are
not, speculators are writing at the telegraph desk as fast as they can take each other's places, and it is obvious from the numerous trips everybody is making through the door that leads into the bar-room that the reflection the chief executive of a Southern State is said to have cast upon the holder of the highest office in the gift of the people of an adjoining commonwealth may not be flung broadcast in Cripple Creek.
The turmoil of the hotel corridor was interrupted on the evening of my arrival in camp by the clerk rapping on his desk with a rider. Every one in the room at once gave attention, and even the stolid idlers who had been devoted to the walls turned their heads and appeared interested as an unusually pretty little girl of twelve years was lifted to the counter.
She was dressed very tastefully, and was not one-tenth part as embarrassed as the cashier of a bank, who introduced her as "Little Sara," and informed the assemblage that she would speak for herself.
Little Sara did speak for herself.
"Some of you know who I am—those of you who come from Denver,"
she said, in a singularly sweet voice. "I am 'Little Sara,' the dancer. Well, I am on my way to San Francisco, where I am going to have an engagement, and I have come to Cripple Creek on my way to sell my photograph to help pay expenses.
You see. I have been to considerable expense this year, because I have been taking lessons in New York, and they charge you like everything' down there. The photographs are fifty cents each, and I have them for sale right here."
Almost every one in the room bought a photograph, and Little Sara answered all questions concerning herself with the utmost freedom and composure while she stowed away her half-dollars.
She combined a winning childish simplicity with the savoir faire of a woman twice her age. It should not be understood that she was at all forward, either. It was hard to believe, in fact, that, laboring under her disadvantages, she should appear such a well-bred little girl.
Little Sara has supported herself and her eight-year-old brother by dancing since the death of her father, two years ago, and last summer was in the Lillian Russell Company in Chicago. In the winter she came to New York to take lessons, and paid her expenses and tuition out of her savings.
She makes her own contracts with managers and travels alone/unless, as on the occasion of her visit to Cripple Creek, she takes her small brother with her. No princess could have been treated with greater deference than was shown Little Sara in the mining camp, and when she left on the stage a day or two later the leading citizens gathered to see her off.
Where, outside of our great West, shall be found a match for her enterprise and self-reliance in a child of her age?
There were other unusual characters in Cripple Creek. One of these is an English "shift boss," normally as rough of speech and manner as any miner in the camp, who, when sufficiently under the influence of liquor to forget himself, betrays the fact that he is a man of education in his use of the language and his general knowledge.
He can never be induced to say aught about himself, and never speaks except in the frontier dialect save when drink causes him to forget his caution. Another scholar among the miners is an Irishman who was educated for the priesthood in Dublin, but came to the mines a dozen years ago. and is fond of quoting Latin and Greek, but still fonder of a bout at fisticuffs with any man in camp of his own size or a size or two larger.
Public amusements in Cripple Creek, as in other mining camps, are confined mostly to gambling-saloons and dance-halls, though Cripple Creek has a theatre and a regular stock company. I had the pleasure of seeing this company in The Streets of New
York
The theatre is situated over a livery-stable, which circumstance precludes the necessity for smelling-salts in the audience. The auditorium was heated by a great wood-stove close to the stage, which roasted the people in the front seats, but had little effect in the rear of the room.
In consequence attention was frequently diverted from the stage by conflicts between the gentlemen in the front row, who attempted to moderate the heat of the stove, and gentlemen from the back seats, who come up to put more wood on the fire and open the dampers. The Columbia Stock Company of players had not, perhaps, been favored with as careful training as they might have received at the Comédie
Francaise, nor had much attention been paid to their wardrobes, yet there are first-class companies in first-class theatres that would be glad to have so attentive an audience.
The only real contretemps that occurred was when the gentleman who took the part of Mark Livingston (with an unmistakable Bowery accent and Baxter Street outfit), and who played throughout the first four acts close to the wings, whence issued a still small voice reading his lines to him, gave way to impatience in the last act as he was haltingly pleading his undying affection for Lucy Fairweather (with an unmistakable Hoosier dialect and Terre Haute dressmaker), and reaching into the wings, snatched the book of the play, from which he read the rest of bis part with as much composure as was possible in view of the circumstance that the unseen prompter was profanely threatening him with evisceration and excecation from the side, to the great delight of the front rows.
The dancing and music halls of the mining-camp afford scope for scarcely any other sentiments than those of pity and disgust. The women, who alternately sing on the stage and dance with the men on the floor, are ridiculously pathetic objects in their soiled short skirts, cheap fancy stockings, and shabby gilded shoes, with their grotesque efforts at coquetry among their loutish male companions.
Their duties include those of waitresses; and as each de- |
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pends for her livelihood on the commission she gets from the sale of drinks, there is an active alcoholic propaganda in constant operation. Most of these women are incredibly old and faded and ugly, and their efforts artificially to conceal the ravages of time and dissipation pitifully palpable.
There are numerous very young girls among them too, some scarcely more than fourteen or fifteen years of age, who seem as hardened and depraved as their elders.
Cripple Creek is not the only town in-what is known as the Cripple Creek district. There are the old-established towns of Mound City, Anaconda,
Arequa, Lawrence, and Hull City, which have been in existence more than a year; and Altman and Victor, only a few months under construction, and populated mostly by the employes of the mines.
Altman consists of scarcely more than two rows of log houses on the slope of a hill; but it has a full-fledged government, a newspaper, and a general store, with
blase dummies wearing beautiful ready-made clothes and fashionable hats in the window, as politely as if they were looking out on Broadway instead of into the wilderness.
Central City is the principal town
of "the Little Kingdom of Gilpin," after Cripple Creek the leading gold-producing district of Colorado, but, unlike Cripple Creek, an old-established camp that for the last fifteen years has turned out its $2,000,000 per annum in gold. Eight thousand people, living in Central City, Black Hawk, and
Nevadaville, that lie— like a string of sausages, as a poetically minded resident observed—across the mountains, are supported by these gold mines.
One of the fine views of the Rockies is afforded from the railroad train that zigzags along the edge of the mountain, partly on trestle-work, from Black Hawk to Central City.
From the windows of this train it almost seems possible to drop a plumb-line into the chimneys of the Black Hawk buildings, and a train that went off the track at one point would fall on to the roofs.
I considered this possibility as the train slowly climbed along the mountain-side, and am glad that I was not informed until afterward that the trestle had been condemned.
A more bleak and desolate region—in spite of its mineral wealth—than this "Little Kingdom" it is difficult to imagine. There is nothing of the picturesque about it. In the towns the most prominent buildings are the dingy smelteries and milling-plants, and the distinguishing features are railroad and tram-car tracks, and dirty ore-wagons drawn by tired-looking horses and mules, with the usual array of idlers before the saloon doors or smoking short pipes on the edge of the sidewalks.
On the hills everything is bare and forlorn in appearance, for the workers are belowground, and the unpainted shaft-houses on the mountain-sides do not add beauty to the landscape. The roads are rough and deeply cut by the heavy loads of ore that are constantly hauled over them, and as far as the eye can reach across the granite hills are the ragged scars made by the gold-hunters, showing while against the gray.
Gregory's Gulch, where gold was first found, has been worked down to the bed-rock for miles by the placers, and there is scarcely ten feet of earth in the
district that has not been turned over by the miner's shovel.
We drove over Seaton Mountain to the Union Pacific
Railroad at Idaho Springs, where is the mouth of the New-house tunnel, the
mining sensation of Colorado to-day. On this drive of between four and five miles we passed more than three hundred mines and prospect-holes on established ore veins, a majority of which were idle because it costs more to pump the water from them after the shaft is sunk below a certain depth than the product amounts to.
One mine stopped work after it had been computed that for every ton of ore that had been taken out for a month over forty tons of water had been lifted to the surface. For years the idea of running a tunnel under Seaton Mountain to cut the gold veins that have already been worked from the top has been
discussed, but the project was so vast that nothing was ever done about it until a year ago, when Newhouse quietly purchased the Idaho Springs end of the mountain, and prepared to bore a hole through to Central City.
Two hydraulic plants are located on the property, so that in case any accident should happen to the machinery of one the work need not be delayed, for the Newhouse tunnel is being drilled more rapidly than any hole was ever before bored through solid granite.
Three shifts of men, using the latest and most approved hydraulic drills, work eight hours each out of the twenty-four, and each shift makes five feet per day. The tunnel is now in a thousand feet under the base of the mountain; and as it is to run under Seaton Mountain, Russell Gulch, and Quartz Hill, a distance of between four and five miles, it will take four years to complete it.
It will probably be a year before a gold vein of any magnitude is reached, but miners estimate that the tunnel will make $200,000,000 worth of the precious metal accessible. As Gilpin County, which has the smallest area of any county in the State, has already produced $75,000,000 in gold since the "Pike's Peak excitement, "when the precious metal was first discovered in Colorado, its claim to the title of "the Little Kingdom " would seem to be justified.
The Newhouse tunnel, however, which runs at a depth of 2500 feet below the top of Seaton Mountain, and will be 2300 below the surface at its terminus in Central City, will rob Gilpin of some of its glory as well as of a large part of its population, since the ore from the tunnel will be brought to the surface at Idaho Springs, where already great milling-plants and smelteries are being erected.
The tunnel is 13 feet wide and 8 feet high. A double car track runs into it, the rails being laid in 15 feet further each day as the tunnelling progresses. Five men in each of the three eight-hour shifts direct the two Leyner drills, that are kept going the entire twenty-four hours, with three brief intervals for blasting and clearing away the debris far enough back to go on with the drilling again, when the broken granite is run out to the "dump" at the mouth of the tunnel on cars.
Leadville, which once set the pace for all mining-camps, is now staid and quiet, and the dimensions of the coroner's office and its prominent location is all that is left to suggest the tales of blood and heroism that even more than the marvellous mineral wealth of the district gave the town a worldwide reputation.
Residents say that the population has been reduced at least 3000 in the last two years by the migration of miners to Cripple Creek, and sadly recall the days when the file of men at the post-office delivery window was a quarter of a mile long, and the loafers of Leadville made an easy living by forming in this line, and selling their places to busy men to whom time was money.
Nevertheless, there arc plenty of gambling-saloons and dance-halls open in Leadville to-day, and no citizen or visitor need be driven to bed before daybreak because he has no other place to go to.
In a business sense Leadville, however, is still one of the most wide-awake cities on earth. The great silver mines of Carbonate, Fryer, and Iron Hills, which have already yielded $175,000,000 in silver and lead, are closed.
The Maid of Erin mine, from which alone has been taken one and a half millions in silver, is running pumping machinery at a cost of $1000 per
week to prevent filling up with water, while not an ounce of ore is being mined. Accepting the situation that there is no money to be made in silver at present, the silver mines are practically abandoned.
"The world wants gold," said the Leadville
Herald-Democrat, early in the year, voicing the sentiment of the citizens. "Well, we will give it gold." And forthwith the miners have turned their energies to its production with the same vigor that characterized the exploitation of the silver district fifteen years ago.
Throughout the gold belt, which, is about four square miles in extent, from Long and Deny Hill across Printer Boy and Breece Hills, Ball Mountain and Little Ellen Hill to Big-Evans Gulch, shafts are being sunk as rapidly as men and machinery can accomplish miracles. All over this district shaft-houses are springing up like magic, the lonely hills— lonely no longer — are swarming with workmen, up the roads mules and horses are dragging heavy machinery, and the sound of the hammer scarcely ceases day and night.
Mines like the Little Johnny, the Uncle Sam, the Eliza, and the Highland Chief are already big producers; and so rapidly are all mining operations being pushed that a conservative estimate of Leadville's gold production for this year is $2,000,000, which the miners promise to increase by geometrical progression in 1895 and 1896.
The mine-owners and superintendents of Leadville, as in the rest of Colorado, are very hospitable in the way of allowing gentlemen whose feet are sensitive to go down in the mines; and the proper thing is for your host to knock off a bit of ore from a rich vein and present it to you, with, the information that it is worth so many thousand dollars a ton.
He seldom offers to send a ton to your address, however. The visitor is not expected to manifest any uneasiness in the shaft-house when a miner puts Hercules powder in his boot-tops to carry below for blasting, and then backs up close to the red hot stove. Neither must the tenderfoot hesitate to stand on the edge of a bucket, clinging to the rope with one hand and holding a candle in the other, to drop down a few hundred feet into a mine.
Should he get into the bucket for the descent his shame will be perpetuated while he remains in camp. It is also bad form for the visitor to admit that he is fatigued after a mining superintendent has put him through a course of sprouts below the surface—up and down shaky perpendicular ladders; over the inclines of the slopes, where the green one walks in a crouching position, and knocks his head against the timbering at every other step; through passages where he climbs on all-fours, or even crawls on his belly; over open shafts, where he knows there is an even chance of his falling part way to the centre of the earth; and through mud and water of various depths.
Benjamin
Sadtler, Professor of Metallurgy and Mineral ogy in the Colorado State School of Mines, one of the first practical as well as scientific authorities on mining in the West, estimates the gold production for Cripple Creek this year at $7,000,000, "for Gilpin County at $4,000,000. for Leadville at $2,000,000, and for Clear" Creek at from one-half to three-quarters of a million dollars, with a sufficient output from the smaller camps to bring the total up to between fifteen and twenty millions.
The estimates for the succeeding five or ten years, when the Newhouse tunnel reaches the rich veins of Seaton Mountain, the shafts of Cripple Creek and Leadville are sunk deeper, and the new mines begin to produce, are enormous.
One of Colorado's pioneers, who has himself made a fortune in silver, said to me, "Two years from now Colorado will have forgotten that she ever was a silver State." |
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